I know it’s heresy. Mashups and Web 2.0 are what’s hot, right? I myself am considered to be a “mashup creator” working with Web 2.0 concepts.

But that era is behind us. The term “Mashup” made sense when coders were actually lifting data from places it was hard to lift from and putting it into contexts that were hard to access. This, my friends, is no longer the state of affairs on the Internet.

Today, we are working with a world of data that wants to be free and is published via countless, well documented API’s. In the cases where API’s are still not available (or whorishly published in hopes of becoming universally adopted), advanced tools and protocols are available to automate what used to be hard.

We must remember that the word “mashup” hails back to music, originally; a talented music editor might string together pieces of previously recorded music to create something new. This was an artform in itself, and implied a kind of subversion. A repurposing of content, often done without the permission or knowledge of the original creator.

Well, the days of this kind of thing on the Internet are, thanks to everybody’s efforts to open things up, largely over. In a world where open source software is widely accepted, where it makes sense for companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon (and gee, every other damn company out there) to publish API’s that encourage their data to be woven into the fabric of the net, there is no need for the coy sense of subversion that comes from the word “Mashup.”

What we’ve got now, folks, is DATA! Great flowing rivers of it! Software that helps us use it! Ruby on Rails, Asterisk, MySQL, PGSQL, Apache, Freeswitch, Flex! Where it’s not open source, it’s at least free! Everything has an API and the things that don’t are falling away.

The next person that says to me with a straight face that they “make mashups” is going to get sucker-punched. The word has lost its meaning, so let’s move on.

That said, explaining to a layperson what it is we “creative coders” do, sometimes you, well, have to resort to saying, “I make mashups.” But do us all a favor, try to explain what that really means today. Let’s move to a world where we can think about data, about tools (which is really just code-as-data), and imagining what we can do with it all.

Mashup was a good word for perhaps 2003-2007, but it implies limitations and barriers that simply no longer exist. We can do better.

What would YOU call the innovations that are possible with all the data and tools we have today?

4 comments ↓

your hopelessly optimistic about the openness and availability of all of these api’s. for a tiny segment of internet toys you might be right be in the larger world and in corporations they are still a huge barrier.

Back up. What I said was that there are many, many widely available API’s, and that where there aren’t, there are tools that make consuming non-API-enabled data easy.

I’ve been writing tools to scrape and systematize data since the early days of the Internet, and my point is that it is nowhere near the feat that it once was.

My point is that by putting the emphasis on the “act” of mashing up (and the technical prowess required to marshal data into a usable form) is not the essential point. That’s like praising the act of computing itself. It’s the *output* that matters.

Once we have finished worshipping the act of data-gathering itself, we can begin to contemplate the potential meaning and use of that data.

Davegreat point and you are miles in front of what’s nextyou have literally captured the global zeitgeist with your brilliantaps_watching twitter thoughts & flickr pics and video fly randomly from across the planet was as compelling as human nature itself_i will show everyone i know_a grand vision you have sir_and for that you have my respect and compliments

Amen! For the most part. The emerging “Linked Data Web” (foundation layer of broader Semantic Web vision) ushers in a period of Open Data Access on the Web, where the Data behind Web pages is available in structured form — enabling a global ability to “Mesh” rather than “Mash” web accessible Data.